Sinaloa

map SinaloaThe Mexican state of Sinaloa (2.9 million) is too small to qualify as a millisphere but combined with the state of Sonora (also 2.9 million) we have a millisphere stretching from the US border in the north to Guadalajara in the south. I call this millisphere “Sinaloa” because both states are “controlled” by the Sinaloa drug cartel.

Sinaloa’s colonisation by Spain in the 16th century transformed the landscape. Concerned about Cortez and his conquistadors turning Mexico into their own domain King Charles sent his personal bodyguard, Nuno de Guzman, to establish control for the Spanish crown.

On horseback, de Guzman’s forces headed northwest into unclaimed territory, following Indian walking trails from village to village, slaughtering and enslaving and capturing corn supplies. Slaves were used to open the walking trails though the thorny scrub to accommodate a man on a horse and we have the route the highway follows today.

Proving to be truly psychotic in his attempt to outdo Cortez de Guzman was eventually sent back to Spain in chains, leaving behind an almost deserted millisphere. When gold and silver were discovered in the Sierras, Amerindian and African slaves and poor Spaniards were brought in, and their descendants populate the Sinaloa millisphere today.

Last week the former “head” of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquin Guzman, aka El Chapo, was convicted in a New York Federal Court on firearms, drug trafficking and money laundering charges. Key witnesses to testify against El Chapo were Jesus Zambada and Vicente Zambada the brother and the son of “El Mayo” Zambada, who now heads the Sinaloa cartel – along with El Chapo’s sons.

El Chapo was born in Mexico’s “Triangulo Dorado” (Golden Triangle), in the mountains between Culiacan, Durango and Chihuahua, some time in the 1950s. Poverty in Mexico and the demand for cannabis in America meant El Chapo was growing marijuana from an early age.

By the 1960s the Sinaloa marijuana farmers had formed a growers’ collective and were developing stronger varieties of cannabis. The potent “sinsemilia” strain (Spanish for “without seed”) was developed in Sinaloa and much of the weed the hippies were smoking north of the border in the 1970s was being supplied by what became the Sinaloa Cartel.

El Chapo’s strength was “freight logistics”, and he had a network of tunnels dug across the US/Mexico border. The Columbians nicknamed him El Rapido for the speed he moved their cocaine into the American market and by the 1990s the Sinaloa cartel was fabulously wealthy – and El Chapo was in jail.

In 2001 he escaped from prison for the first time and he was on the loose somewhere in Sinaloa when my travel companion and I passed through. Mazatlan, where El Chapo was recaptured in 2014, was a laid back, heritage tourist town with a nice beach. Motorhome parks were filled with “snow birds” from as far north as Canada.

Los Mochis, where El Chapo was recaptured, again, in 2018, is where you catch the Chihuahua-Pacific that takes you through the scenic Copper Canyon (deeper and longer that the Grand Canyon).

At Los Mochis we slept in and missed the early “tourist” train. Trundeling northeast towards the Sierras, a bi-plane, trailing a plume of mist, came in low and sprayed our train, and a team of Mexicans picking tomatoes, probably for Los Angeles; vulchers settled on Saroya cacti in the sunset, and it was dark when we entered the canyon.

Since El Chapo’s recapture and extradition to New York, the volume of heroin crossing Mexico’s northern border into the USA has gone up by 40 percent and Fentanyl is up 100 percent. Since de-facto cannabis decriminalisation in many US states, Mexican marijuana exports have dropped by 40 percent.

Sitting in the Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Centre, in New York, El Chapo now faces being transferred to the dreaded ADX, in Colorado, where 500 men are kept in permanent solitary confinement.

Fifteen tonnes of Columbian cocaine is worth 39 million in LA, 48 million in Chicago, and 78 million in New York, still the most lucrative market (Guzman trial evidence).

“The day I don’t exist [drugs] are not going to decrease in anyway at all,” Joaquin Archivaldo Guzman Loera, Rolling Stone interview, 2017.

North wind

North Wind

“That’s a millisphere!” I thought when I heard Le Vent du Nord, on stage at Womad, say the Canadian province of Quebec has eight million inhabitants. I include Quebec with the “Atlantic Canada” provinces (total population 2.3 million) in a millisphere I call North Wind (Eastern Canada).

It gets seriously cold there; last Christmas Eve, during near record low temperatures, a US Navy warship, commissioned in Buffalo New York only a week earlier, got stuck in ice in the Saint Lawrence, on its way to Florida – and stayed there for a month.

Le Vent du Nord are a progressive folk ensemble playing (and singing) French Canadian folk songs with fiddles, guitar, hurdy-gurdy, accordion and bouzouki – they sounded Cajun.

From the stage they acknowledged the welcome the performers had received from the Taranaki iwi and said there were some things that should be done for their indigenous peoples. Quebec is an Algonquian word for “where the river narrows”, the river being the Saint Lawrence. Other tribes are the Iroquois and Mohawk in the south and Inuit in the north but there is inter-reservation migration and the traditional “Indians” are a small minority, living in caravans and sheds on small reservations.

The majority tribe are the French Canadians, the French speaking residents of Quebec, who all relate back to 10,000 Catholic French settlers who came in the early 1600s. At first there was a serious imbalance of men to women so squaws were taken for wives and their bloodlines can be seen on the faces of the modern Quebecois.

The minority tribe in Quebec are the British, who took the French colony by conquest in 1763, and independence for the French speaking province has been an ongoing issue ever since. When the Parti Quebecois gained control of the provincial government the French language was granted more status although independence referenda held in 1980 and 1995 where both voted down, the last by a narrow margin.

The House of Commons of Canada passed a symbolic motion recognising Quebecois as a nation within a United Canada but Quebec closely watches Brexit, Scotland and Catalonia. These days they call it the “neverendum,” a debate that continues indefinitely and remains unresolved.

As part of doing a millisphere column I like to talk with people who have been there and I interviewed a St Johns Hill couple who grew up in Montreal, the world’s second largest french speaking city, in the 1950s and 60s.

Most of the people of Quebec live in the south, by the St Laurence, and most of them live in Montreal (metro population 4 million) which is an ancient city, in North American terms, and, like New Orleans, had a unique French/cultured European/cosmopolitan flavour. Montreal is a university town, has a thriving arts and design scene and has Canada’s biggest Jewish population.
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Montreal was also a city divided by the Saint Lawrence boulevard, the east side was French and for an English schoolgirl in an enclave in west there was no reason to go there. To the north there were the Laurentian Mountains cultivated as a playground for Montreal and then there was a vast wilderness. Including all its rivers, lakes and dams Quebec is 12 percent freshwater and has 3 percent of the world’s renewable fresh water.

In the 1950s and 60s Indians were relegated to history but in 2010 a party of Quebec Iroquois, which means “they who smoke”, travelled to the World Lacrosse Championships in the United Kingdom on their own passports; Hillary Clinton interceded to allow their passage through the United States but the British government refused to recognise the Iroquois passports.

The independence issue had created uncertainty and consequently the wealthy moved their money to Ontario (Ottawa and Toronto) leaving Montreal a bit of a backwater, escaping urban renewal

In Quebec City, which is even more of a backwater, a young French Canadian man is standing trial for murder (shooting up a mosque). Immigration and emigration are both issues in the current provincial election campaign namely; Syrian and other Islamic immigrants coming in and young, rural and Anglo (English speaking) emigrants leaving.

New York (part two)

Millisphere, noun: A discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the total world population.

This summer I ran into “Squirrel”, an “art-mover” who had once gone to New York to install tuku-tuku panels as part of the $US two billion plus upgrade of the United Nations building.

Originally built in the 1940s, with a $65 million interest-free loan from the United States government, the United Nations HQ has been a steady earner for the City of New York ever since. “The further you go away from the UN the cheaper the hotel rooms are,” Squirrel observed.

Depending on point of view the United Nations is either a global humanitarian organisation or a bloated New York based bureaucracy controlled by the world’s arms manufacturers. Ever since the American Civil War, New York arms dealers have prospered from just about any conflict going. New York physicist, Robert Oppenheimer, led the “Manhattan Project” which built the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the nearby “Trump World Tower” is the “World Bar” where UN diplomats socialise and the Saudis own an entire floor there for their UN delegation. Newsman Walter Cronkite, at the time, led a protest against the building of the Trump Tower; claiming it would dwarf the UN building, block views and was aesthetically unappealing. Following advice from his mentor, Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, Trump counter-sued and built his “slab of banality.”

After the US decided to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem the UN Security Council took the unprecedented step of censuring the US. “We will be taking names,” the US threatened, cut UN funding and closed the Palestinian’s office in Washington.

New York is 60% Christian, one in three New Yorkers are Catholic and one in five are Jewish, over half of whom live in Brooklyn. One third of all US Jews live in New York. During the 1970s Brezhnev/Nixon negotiated detente another wave of Russian Jewish immigrants arrived in Brooklyn, including mobsters released from Soviet prisons.

Since the days of Al Capone doing business with the Mob has been almost inescapable in New York. Lately the Cosa Nostra have been displaced by the Russian Mafia who have moved up from drugs and extortion into high level finance. New York’s Russian Mafia now import most of the Afghan heroin consumed in the United States.

New York is the world’s preeminent banking and finance city. Two of the previous three chairmen of the Federal Reserve have been from New York. The 2008 global financial crisis was caused by trillions of dollars of toxic derivatives going down a plughole somewhere in New York – where they were originally invented. The largest ponzi scam off all time netted New York investment adviser Bernard Madoff $US 65 billion.

New York is the most important source of funding for US presidential campaigns. The last US Democrat primary was between New York native Bernie Sanders and former New York senator Hillary Clinton, who was ultimately defeated by New York reality television star and property developer Donald Trump.

The art of “public relations” was invented in New York (to bring the US into WWI) and its broadcast networks, ABC, NBC, CBS & Fox, shape public opinion worldwide through both traditional and “new” media, promoting an ideology of vulgar conspicuous consumption and ultra-superficial patriotism. Facebook boss, Mark Zuckerberg, is from New York and Madison Ave taught the world how to drive the that consumption.

New York markets itself as “the most energy efficient efficient city in the US,” but generates 14 million tonnes of trash per year (more than any city in the world). Once dumped at sea now the Mob moves the trash to landfill in the surrounding states.

The millisphere of New York dominates the politics of the United States which in turn casts its shadow over rest of the world. New York intellectual property lawyers initiated the raid on Kim Dotcom’s mansion in Auckland. Billy the Kid, Timothy McVeigh and Harvey Weinstein were all from The Big Apple.

New York’s legendary “creativity and entrepreneurship” has its dark side. Rather than calling other countries “shit-holes” Donald Trump should look at his own backyard.

 

New York (part one)

Millisphere, abstract noun: a discrete region inhabited by approximately one-thousandth of the total world population.

 

I had intended to continue examining the millispheres of Africa but after a recent tweet by Donald Trump, referring to African countries as “shitholes”, I thought I’d look at his millisphere – New York – for no other reason than to establish a benchmark for deciding what is and what is not a shithole.

 

The City of New York (1970 population 7.9 million, 2016 population 8.5 million) is the centre of the much larger “conurbation” (population twenty-five million) spread over several northeastern American states.

 

New York attracts more that 60 million tourists a year and has three of the ten most visited tourist sites in the world. Larry Morris (singer in the 1960s NZ band Larry’s Rebels) slipped across the border from Canada and spent a decade working in America as an undocumented alien, visiting New York “about three times a year.”

 

“I LOVED New York,” Larry said. “To me it was like a very big Ponsonby and I felt totally at ease there. I found parts of Manhattan very cold and dark looking though, Wall Street in particular, surrounded by massive skyscrapers that would not let the sun in unless directly overhead. Musically the New York jazz scene was especially cool and I loved Broadway and Central Park with its John Lennon memorial garden.”

 

Frederick Olmsted, who helped design Central Park, gained his organisational skills while in charge of sanitation on the American Civil War battlefields. Considered the grandfather of American landscape architecture, Olmsted later became an advocate for conservation and national parks.

 

Musicians: Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Maria Callas, Mariah Carey, Duke Ellington, Art Garfunkel, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Lena Horne, Billy Joel, Norah Jones, Lady Gaga, Cyndi Lauper, Barry Manilow, Yehudi Menuhin, Gerry Mulligan, Harry Nilsson, The Ramones, Lou Reed, Carly Simon, Phoebe Snow, Artie Shaw and Fats Waller were all native New Yorkers. Hip Hop (Rap) music originated in the Bronx.

 

Many other musicians came to make their name in New York. Robert Zimmerman, from Minnesota, worked up his act in the folk clubs of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village – and changed his name to Bob Dylan. New Zealand’s Lorde got heckled at a New York concert, last week, for her principled decision to not play Tel Aviv,

 

New York has the largest Native American population in the United States – traditionally coming to work in high-rise construction. Although he looks Hispanic, singer Willy DeVille’s grandmother was one of the last purebred Native Americans in New York state and Willy was a New Yorker to his bones.

 

First Dutch, then English and finally American, New York became a destination for refugees from Europe; the Irish, Germans, Italians and East Europeans came to start a new life in the New World. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to break free,” said Emma Lazarus – whose ancestors had emigrated from Germany and Portugal before the American revolution.

 

New York has the largest Chinese population of any city outside Asia and has 2.4 million Hispanics and 1.9 million Blacks. There are over 200 languages spoken in New York and half of all New Yorkers speak a language other than English at home. New York now has the largest foreign born population of any city in the world.

 

New York dealer galleries and art institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim arbitrate what constitutes “high art,” anointing locals like Diane Arbus, Edward Hopper and Roy Lichtenstein. New Zealand artists such as Billy Apple, Len Lye and Max Gimblett went to make their names in New York and Pittsburgh commercial artist Andy Warhol came for his “fifteen minutes of fame,” and stayed. Realist New York painter Norman Rockwell was loved worldwide for his kitch Saturday Evening Post covers and it was in New York that spray-can graffiti “bombing” originated, also to be embraced globally.

 

The most densely populated city in the United States, New York is known for its creativity, entrepreneurship, social tolerance, environmental sustainability, freedom and cultural diversity – for the other side of the coin check out next Tuesday’s On the contrary.

Houston

Millisphere: a region containing one thousandth of the total world population, around seven million people.

Natural disasters have a way of revealing aspects of the geography of the region affected.

The Greater Houston metropolitan area (pop 6.5 million and the fourth largest in the USA) was last week flooded by Hurricane Harvey, which broke all previous records for rainfall.

This “natural” disaster was actually a perfect storm of economics, population and land use.

In 1900 the deadliest hurricane in US history devastated Galveston, when a 4.6-metre storm surge swept over the 2.4-metre high island on which it was built. Not surprisingly many of the survivors moved inland to nearby Houston.

Built on a swamp, Houston has 4000 kilometres of managed waterways – the first of them dug by hand by black slaves and Mexicans. Today it is estimated that one in ten of Houston’s residents is an illegal “alien” from south of the Mexican border.

Parts of Houston have been sinking because of the extraction of groundwater. Some areas have subsided by 3m since 1920, others by 300mm in a decade, creating cracked foundations, uneven footpaths and areas where floodwaters collect.

Houston has very few planning restrictions. Developer-friendly bylaws and no formal zoning code mean that housing was cheap and Houston largely escaped the 2008 economic crisis when American house prices plummeted.

Described by some as “America’s worst designed city,” Houston has doubled in population since 1980, with the resulting urbanization exacerbating the flooding. To cope with the extra run-off many of the waterways needed widening but that would require the city coming up with billions to buy out the properties lining the “bayous.”

A graph of the rainiest days in Houston (1890 – 2016) reveals a trend to intensified rainfall with extreme weather events more frequent. Climate modeling depends on a complex confluence of factors but the world’s temperature is about 0.7℃higher than 1980 and for each degree celsius increase air holds 7% more water.

Houston is the “oil and gas capital of the world” and has the headquarters of over 500 global energy firms. The Shell Oil Company (the US branch of Royal Dutch Shell) has a head office there with 22,000 employees.

The Shell Oil Company’s “futurists” came up with “three hard truths” that the company faced. They were: 1. that global energy demand is rising; 2. that the supply of conventional energy will not be able to keep up, and; 3. that climate change is both real and dangerous.

Red Adair the famous oil well firefighter was from Houston. As well as providing jobs in the downstream oil and gas industry Houston is known for its terrible traffic and bad public transport. The climate is very hot and humid and there are fire ants, snakes, alligators, “mosquitoes the size of sparrows” and residents are forced to spray once a month for the cockroaches. It also has the distinction of being America’s “fattest city.”

Both the Bush presidents, Ted Cruz, Indianapolis 500 race car driver A J Foyt, Howard Hughes, Kenny Rogers, Rodney Crowell and some of ZZ Top are all from Houston and it has the highest number of Fortune 500 companies after New York.

The Port of Houston is the second largest US port in total tonnage (2015) and the first US port in foreign tonnage (2016), exporting oil field equipment, plastic, resins, synthetic rubber, insecticide and chemical fertilizers.

As well as “natural” disasters art has a way of revealing aspects of the geography of a region. Houston’s phenomenally wealthy oil industry has a collective a reputation for patronising “high” art such a Mark Rothko’s multi denominational chapel built to display his blue/black modernist abstract paintings dedicated to “truth and freedom.”

The paintings are so much part of the architecture that visitors have been known to ask: “where are the paintings?”

The Latino barrios are decorated with folk art such as “bathtub Madonnas” – an old decorated bath, sometimes with lights, standing upright with a madonna inside.

President Trump declared the Sunday after the deluge a national day of prayer for the victims of Hurricane Harvey. Planning might be more useful than prayer to avoid future “natural” disasters.

 

Chilangolandia

It didn’t matter who became the next president of the Nation of Darkness (POTNOD). Nothing will change very fast. Their toxic food, drug and gun culture will remain and the American empire will continue to spend half its annual budget on “defence” i.e. weapons of mass destruction.

Currently the world is fixating on travel restrictions, imposed by the new POTNOD, but crossing a United States border could be an unpleasant experience already, whether it is entering the “homeland” or crossing between states.

In Europe your details will have been processed while you are still in the air and when you land at Schiphol or Frankfurt you just walk straight in, and it’s the same driving from one country to the next. In the EU there will be a sign beside the road as you drive across the border, not a state trooper asking to see your passport yet again as in “the States”.

I remember the first time I entered the United State of America I was presented with the following sentence: Have you ever been arrested or convicted of an offence or crime involving moral turpitude or a violation related to a controlled substance; or been arrested or convicted for two or more offences for which the aggregated sentence or confinement was five years or more; or been a controlled substance trafficker; or are you seeking entry to engage in criminal or immoral activities?

A country, which has been known to engage in assassination and torture and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands civilians in some military adventure abroad, was asking me if I had committed a moral turpitude! Tempting as it was to ask the border person what a turpitude was and whether Uncle Sam had the blood of innocent people on his hands, I thought it was safer to just tick the no box.

I once discovered that if you want to experience bad tempered American border guards at their rudest try crossing from Mexico, at night and without a visa (coming from a visa waiver country New Zealanders don’t need a visa). And then there is the lengthy process of standing on two yellow footprints and looking at a camera, as a machine, a good deal more intelligent than its operator, computerises your iris, finger and thumbprints.

Unfortunately if you place a string on a globe east from Auckland to Heath Row in London it will pass directly over LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) which most travellers to and from Europe use as their half way transit hub.

There are Air New Zealand flights direct to San Diego and Houston (for those wanting to travel on to Cuba, Mexico and Central America) and one to Vancouver, which means it is possible fly east around the north of the USA.

Mexico City International Airport (MEX) would be a convenient transit hub for both the Caribbean and Central America or onwards to Europe but as yet there are no direct flights from NZ to MEX for travellers who want to avoid the Nation of Darkness

MEX is Latin America’s second busiest airport and air traffic there “exceeds current capacity.” A new international airport will be completed next year and with the capability to move 120 million passengers per year it has the potential to become the busiest airport in the world.

A media spokesperson said Air New Zealand was not considering a direct flight to Mexico City anytime soon.

Given the choice of stopping over in LAX or MEX I would recommend the later. It helps if you can speak a little Spanish but the art galleries and museums, the street life and music, the food and the Hispanic style are well worth the journey. By distancing itself from the drug wars Mexico City is a safe city, of sorts.

The United States of Mexico is a federation of 31 states and one federal district. In the heart of Mexico City is the old “Districto Federal,” population 8.9 million, which has last year been given the status of a state and is now known as the “State of the Valley of Mexico.”

Greater Mexico City has an urban population of over 21 million and counting the surrounding municipalities Mexico City is the centre of a “megalopolis” of 34 million (2015) the sheer scale making it one of the largest economies of any “global city.”

Mexicans refer to Mexico City as “Chilangolandia” – a chilango being a loud, arrogant, ill-mannered, loutish person.

Now that the chilango gringo POTNOD north of the border has scrapped the TPP the Mexican government has initiated direct trade talks with the New Zealand government. What an economic opportunity. New Zealand prime minister Bill English should tell Mexican president Enrique: the first thing we need is a direct flight to MEX as soon as the new international airport is operational in 2018.

Miami (Pahayokee)

Millisphere, n. a discrete region populated by roughly one thousandth of the total world population; a bit over seven million people (but anywhere between 3.5 and 14million will do); a lens through which to study human geography.

This column is on the millisphere of Pahayokee (Seminole Indian for Grassy Water). Pahayokee (population 6.9 million) covers the southern third of the State of Florida, is only a few metres above sea level and mostly covered by the Everglades swamp – actually a very shallow and very wide river slowly flowing from north to south.

For a century and a half “developers” have attempted simultaneously to drain the Everglades for agriculture and to build dikes to protect the Miami Metropolitan Area from flooding.

Today the Everglades are significantly degraded, subject to periodic droughts, fires and floods; salt-water contamination of freshwater aquifers; phosphorus and mercury contamination from agriculture and urbanisation and the invasion of exotic flora and fauna like the Paper-bark (Melaleuca quinquenerria), from Australia, and the Burmese Python, which grows over six metres long.

Realising the magnitude of the environmental damage both the Bush and Obama administrations have approved expensive Everglades environmental repair programs ($US 10 billion to date) and voted to buy out US Sugar’s manufacturing and production businesses, but there have been delays in implementation and urbanisation continues creeping in from the coast.

Meanwhile on the coast the urbanised strip is experiencing “sunny day flooding,” where higher-than-normal tides are bubbling up from the stormwater drains, flooding roads, gardens and apartments. Miami is raising roads, installing pumps and valves and the US Army Corps of Engineers is planning for a 300mm rise in sea level by 2045 at the Kennedy Space Centre further up the coast at Cape Canaveral.

Barack Obama has said that if sea-level-rise, caused by global warming, is a reality; “South Florida is ground zero”. After Guangzhou, in China, South Florida has the highest value of assets subject to flooding with less than half a metre of sea level rise.

Despite these environmental threats the Miami Metropolitan Area is one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the US, with, at present, 25,000 new condominiums proposed and under construction.

Florida’s governor Rick Scott has warned state workers not to discuss climate change or sea-level-rise and instead to refer to “nuisance flooding” and Florida’s senator the Cuban-American Marco Rubio confidently says, “humans are not responsible for climate change”. Florida has about 1.5million Cuban-Americans, many living in Miami’s “Little Havana.”

America’s first Jewish senator, David Levy Yulle, represented Florida in the nineteenth century. Described as “more Jewish than Tel Aviv” Miami Beach has been a favoured retirement destination for Jews from New York, and Jewish immigrants from both Israel and Russia.

Palm Beach is a favoured retirement destination for the super wealthy. Before being locked away for the biggest fraud in American history Bernie Madoff had a home there and was a member of the Palm Beach Country Club. Donald Trump last year sold a Palm Beach mansion to Russian oligarch, Dmitry Rybolovev for $US 95 million.

US president-elect Donald Trump has his beachfront “winter White House”, Mar-a-lago, at Palm Beach West and has taken a “King Canute” position on sea-level-rise, claiming, “global warming is a hoax”, that he is “not a big believer in climate change” and “nobody really knows”; right in the middle of “ground zero” Mar-a-lago is one of the best places in the US to find out though.

Since taking over Mar-a-lago Donald Trump has engaged in series of court actions relating to his property. The first involved a 6m x 9m American flag he put up a 24m pole. Palm Beach regulations limited flagpoles to 13m and the county charged him with violating their code. Trump, naturally, counter-sued, gained a number of concessions, accepted a 21m flagpole and then dropped his suit.

The second case involved repeated actions by Trump against the Palm Beach County to stop noisy aircraft from the Palm Beach International Airport from flying over Mar-a-lago. Trump went so far as to charge the US Federal Aviation Administration with deliberately and maliciously directing aircraft over his property. In 2015 the judge ruled against Trump’s arguments but since winning the American presidency in 2016 Trump can now make Mar-a-lago a no fly zone for reasons of national security – and because he is now the president he can fly a flag as big as he likes!

Donald Trump may be ideally suited to lead the American empire hell bent on consumption at the expense of the environment, but can he hold back the tide at Pahayokee?

Cuba

                            Fidel Castro (1926 – 2016)

When news came out that Fidel Castro had died I got a call from my friend Blackie in Auckland. It has been a sad year for us baby boomers of a certain cultural bent – David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and now Fidel.

In the ‘90s Blackie had worked as a “cowboy carpenter” in Canada and had flown down to Cuba for some holiday sun. “It reminded me of my youth in Northland in the ‘50s,” he said when I asked him about his impressions. “The Cubans I met spoke highly of Fidel and were proud that they had seen off America.” We agreed that Donald Trump’s characterisation of Castro as a “brutal dictator” was predicably shallow and hugely ironic given American dictatorial intervention in Cuban affairs for more than a century.

The flash point for the Spanish-American war was the explosion of the Battleship USS Maine in Havana harbour in 1898. The Americans claimed it was a Spanish mine, but in all probability it was an accidental gas explosion in the coalbunker, igniting the ship’s magazine. “Remember the Maine, down with Spain,” crowed the American media, alleging sabotage and a reason to go to war with Spain and invade Cuba. It was a bit like the “weapons of mass destruction” ruse used by George Bush to invade Iraq.

The defeat of Spain lead eventually to Cuban independence (actually an American protectorate) with the USA awarding itself the lease of a small port in Guantanamo Bay for a coal-bunking station and for “no other use.” Since the 1959 revolution Cuba has disputed American claims to “Gitmo.” Every year America sends a cheque for the lease – which the Cubans decline to bank. Before Fidel, Cuba was described as a brutal kleptocracy with links to American organised crime.

In 1961, CIA trained mercenaries, supported by B52 bombers from Florida, invaded Cuba at the Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) south of Havana. Partly due to President Kennedy loosing his nerve and calling off air support the Cuban Army defeated the invaders. America retaliated by locking into place a complete embargo on Cuba for the next fifty years

Under Barrak Obama there has been a softening of US relations towards Cuba. American tourists are now allowed to travel there and George Bush before him allowed US food exports to Cuba. A majority of Americans now favour normalising relations with Cuba, but Donald Trump doesn’t.

Tourism is now Cuba’s number one foreign currency earner. There are two currencies in Cuba, CUCs (for tourists) and CUPs (Cuban Pesos). There are about 25 Pesos to the CUC and there is talk about unifying the two currencies sometime soon. Remittances from the two million Cuban Americans (1.4million in Florida) amount to nearly $US 3 billion per year.

I spoke with Charlotte, a young New Zealand backpacker who had visited Cuba the month before Fidel died. “It was like no other country I have visited, old cars, not many goods in the shops, no advertising, no media celebrities, Fidel is their hero not the Kardashians,” she told me, but things were changing, there was now Internet. “In a park, at night, for a couple of CUCs, I bought a black market password which got me onto WiFi, it was like buying drugs,” she laughed.

Beverley, from Whanganui, who takes tour groups to Cuba, had also noticed changes. “Before people were allowed to open restaurants and takeaways in their own houses there was no rubbish, no plastic in the street, now there is, it’s sad.” She told me what the others had told me. Cuba was safe for travellers and that all Cubans loved Fidel and were proud of their socialist country. “I have a real soft spot for the Cuban people, the music, the relaxed way of life, I hope it all works out for them,” she concluded.

It is predicted that next year Raul Castro will step down and be replaced by Miguel Diaz Canel, who is seen as a pragmatic moderniser. Some worry that there will not be enough money, some that there will be too much, too fast. Some say that meaningful change can only be equivalent to another revolution.

There are a number of pessimistic scenarios: rape by the United States of America (again), theft by the communist party oligarchy (as in the USSR), hyperinflation, armed Cuban Americans led by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio claiming their lost property back and Havana turns into another Miami.

Optimists pray for a soft landing and sketch out a more hopeful scenario: normalisation with America, a high-speed car-ferry to Key West in Florida (140km from Mariel), creative and meaningful work to progress careers, building on Cuban advances in health and education, tourism based on their built heritage and their natural environment – preserved by Fidel’s conservation initiatives.

Los Angeles

The Millisphere of LA

By my definition a millisphere is a “sphere of interest” of one thousandth of the total world population; a region of roughly 7 million, but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million, people. I use it as a “lens,” a human geography model, through which to attempt to make sense of the world.

In a previous column I had sketched out the millisphere of Te Moananui, covering all the islands of the Pacific. In that column I incorrectly stated that Los Angeles was now the world’s largest Polynesian city, fact checking revealed that Auckland still holds that record.

Los Angeles is one of about 40 millispheres fronting onto Te Moananui, 20 to the East and 20 to the West.

Los Angeles County (population around 10 million) has the second largest urban population (after New York) in the USA and owed its initial 20th century growth spurt to the extraction of oil in California; but it was the Second World War that made it what it is today.

During the Second World War, Los Angeles was home to six of the USA’s major aircraft manufacturers. “We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen or dreamed possible,” commented one general after the war.

That Los Angeles has an African American population has its foundation with the 300,000 black workers brought from the American South to work the LA munitions factories during the Second World War.

Both Lockheed and Martin, later to merge and form Lockheed Martin, the world largest arms manufacturer, were started in LA. The worlds second largest firm, Northrop Grumman, is based in LA.

Excluding China, the world’s arms producers’ total sales in 2013 were somewhere between $US four and seven billion, with six American companies in the top ten.

Lockheed Martin, a sponsor of the “NZ Defence Industry Assn Conference,” in Auckland last week, employs 125,000 (security cleared) workers worldwide and in New Zealand Lockheed Martin have 200 staff embedded in NZ military bases, undertaking prosaic work such as the $446 million upgrade on Te Mana and Te Kaha frigates, and weapon and instrument repair; as well as wiring us into the “five eyes” cyber-surveillance infrastructure run out of Pearl Harbour.

With today’s attacks, you are clueless about who did it or when they will strike again. It is not cyber-war but cyber-terrorism,” said Eugene Kaspersky, an American Internet security firm CEO describing this new form of warfare. The United States has been both a victim and an agent of cyber-attacks.

Arms manufacture has been described as state sponsored research and development and a Keynesian stimulus to the wider economy, this is certainly true of the USA, it’s what built Los Angeles.

Arms manufacture is big business and they amass export earnings for their host state by selling their wares to the developing world.

One theory on the development of the Chinese economy, links its rise to the Vietnam War in the ‘70s. The shipping container was in its infancy until the US Defence Department gave it the 8ftx8ftx10ft ISO standard for a trial run from Los Angeles to Saigon to supply the American forces in Vietnam.

Within a decade the standardised shipping container had gone global, in turn distributing Chinese manufactured goods to a now global market.

In 2015 Long Beach and Los Angeles were America’s largest container ports, but globally they were only 16th and 18th; most of the rest being in Asia, with Shanghai as number one.

The idea of warfare driving cultural development is not new. That the Scientific Revolution happened Europe in the seventeenth century and not somewhere else was, some have suggested, because of Europe’s peculiar geography of competing waring states.

Violent deaths in European wars peaked in the 20th century with death rates of between 10 and 20 million per year during the Second World War, which was then followed by a long period of peace (in terms of the numbers of deaths).

These days globalisation has produced so many shared interests in trade and finance that states prefer to go to arbitration than to war. There are now remarkably few wars between states. Conflicts are now civil wars and these conflicts within states kill fewer people than war between states.

In 2011 the world’s three deadliest conflicts were in Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan but deaths in those conflicts were far fewer than the murders carried out in Mexico’s drug wars with America being the main buyer of the drugs and the seller of the arms. The street gangs of LA are a legend in that ‘plaza’.

The arms industry continues to move with the times; now there is growth to be had as the state polices its own citizens in an increasingly, militarised, American way.

Just as we got used to helicopters and black-clad, para-military NZ police with all the latest equipment swooping on the Kim Dotcom mansion in Auckland (on behalf of the Hollywood) they were doing the same (minus the helicopters) to our local criminal family in Abbot Street in Gonville.

High intensity policing’ and ‘low intensity warfare’ is threatening to merge, at least in LA. The US Army Medical Corps has its training hospital in South LA because of the nationally high numbers of gun shot wounds presenting there.

All the while Hollywood, once again based in LA, presents a constant stream of propaganda, a summary of which is: a gun solves all problems.

What America now needs to consider in its “War on Terror”. How could you wage war on an abstract noun and how could you ever declare victory?

Juarez/El Paso

Donald Trump/Hillary Clinton reality television show

Two American elections ago during their primaries, when Barak Obama beat Hillary Clinton for the candidacy of the Democrat Party, we found ourselves in El Paso USA. That night we had crossed from Juarez on the Mexican side. George Bush had recently given the Mexican government US 1.4 billion dollars worth of weaponry to fight the ‘war on drugs’, much of which ending up in the wrong hands. When we passed through, we were blissfully unaware that the Juarez police were holed up in their police stations, too frightened to come out, as two cartels battled for possession of the ‘plaza.’

‘Safe’ in the USA, I was outside our hotel winding down with a cigarette and met a fellow smoker sheltering from a bitter winter wind. He was attending a political meeting around the corner and invited me along. In a bar, a rally of Ron Paul libertarians supported their candidate, running against John McCain for the Republican nomination. They were an interesting bunch of outsiders: small businessmen, blacks, Navahos, gays and intellectuals for the unfettered right. A city councillor engaged me in conversation. “How does the rest of world see America?” she asked. “As a nation or individuals?” I asked. “As a country, how do you see the United States?” “Well for me,” I replied, “an arrogant bully.” “Can you give me an example?” she continued. “Good question,” I told her, “ in a motel in Chihuahua last night I watched CNN; ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ CNN said, referring to George Bush’s recent trip to Israel, the following item reported his next stop, Saudi Arabia, where he gave them US ten billion dollars worth of military equipment, well,” I concluded, “blessed indeed are the peacemakers, and cursed are the arms dealers.” There was a sharp intake of breath from the councillor – but she had asked.

Barak Obama went on to win the presidency and CNN opined about how far civil rights in their country had come when a black man could be installed in the oval office and there was hope that Obama could disentangle America from the war in the Middle East. By the end of Obama’s two terms, American police have become militarised with surplus equipment from the Middle East and blacks are getting increasingly vocal about being shot down in the street.

Meanwhile the Donald Trump/Hillary Clinton reality television show, currently beaming out of the USA on the global infotainment channels, shows us that life does indeed mimic art. A veteran reality TV star, Trump understands the value of shock for increasing ratings.

Just as ‘America needs a black president,’ was part of Obama’s appeal, now ‘America needs a woman president,’ is part of Clinton’s pitch. Should a woman become the next American president, expect CNN to celebrate gender equality at the highest levels of power – as the daughters of the’ Third Wave’ feminists aspire to be Kardasians, and their granddaughters star in their own porn movies. Either way expect America to continue spending half of its annual budget on ‘defence.’